Fostering entrepreneurs
Innovative Bench Top program puts students in charge of real-deal businesses
Gen Z has been labeled “the most entrepreneurial generation.” They used the COVID-19 lockdown to create businesses, websites, and other “side gigs.” Many of those ventures still thrive.
The University of Richmond is working overtime to meet these entrepreneurs where they are — to help undergraduates accelerate their knowledge of, and experience with, the ins and outs of starting and running their own businesses.
Through Richmond’s Creativity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship (CIE) initiative, students are exposed to real-world scenarios, solutions, and, most importantly, hands-on experience for almost any industry available. One flagship CIE program gaining national attention is Bench Top Innovations, a class that focuses on food-related entrepreneurship.
Bench Top is the brainchild of Dr. Joel Mier and Shane Emmett. Mier is a marketing lecturer in Richmond’s Robins School of Business who also has experience with start-ups, including Netflix. Emmett was the founder and former CEO of Health Warrior, a nutrition bar company founded in Richmond, Virginia, and acquired by PepsiCo. The two put their heads together to come up with a unique spin on an entrepreneurship education. The result is a class without prerequisites, without pre-ordained start-up ideas, and without barriers.
“We said if it's a technology platform then only tech students are going to come to it,” explains Mier. “We kept probing and thinking and then the answer just fell in our lap. Food. Everybody eats food.”
Let's Get Down to Business
The Bench Top mission is to conceive, create, and launch a food product into market with the support and mentorship of Richmond faculty and staff. Sixteen students are chosen for the year-long class and broken into teams of four. At the end of the first semester, the students compete in a “Bake Off” to see which team has created the best tasting and most viable product for the mass market. Once a winner is chosen, the entire group of 16 comes back together and unites to work on manufacturing, operations, distribution, marketing, and sales for the product. The program is in its third year and the products so far have been a nut-free trail mix (Absurd Snacks), a sugar-free energy drink (Twin Tail Brew), and, most recently, a baba ghanoush dip (Noosh).
While many universities offer entrepreneurship programs, Bench Top breaks from the pack with three very distinct features. First, this program is open to any University of Richmond student who is a rising senior, not just business majors. Second, the students maintain 100% of the intellectual property of their product whether they win the bake off or not. Third, the program is piloting a fifth year called Founders in Residence. That program provides the benefits of a salary and school support while getting the business up and running.
“I don't think there's another program where students are able to come in sans idea, they’re given a category, they make all the decisions, they create the product and the brand, they own all the IP and then, as a group, they build the business and monetize it,” says Mier.
What's In Store
Eli Banks and Grace Mittl of Absurd Snacks were in the inaugural class of Bench Top and decided to keep their business going post-graduation. The lure of experiential learning led them to apply to Bench Top, but they stuck with it for another reason.
“There's a lot of onus put on the students to really make it their own journey, which I think makes it a really rich, rich experience,” said Banks.
Absurd Snacks is currently sold in Whole Foods stores in Richmond and in markets along the east coast. Even with the success, the pair still faces challenges.
“I don't think we realized how cash intensive the industry is,” said Mittl. “We quickly realized if we wanted to make this a legitimate venture, it's going to require a lot more resources.”
And those resources include Somiah Lattimore, senior director of CIE. Lattimore says most entrepreneurship classes focus on theories on how to run a business. They often fall short because they’re not hands-on enough and not accessible after graduation. She applauds Richmond for piloting the Founders in Residence program.
“Mark my words this will be a signature program for the university: A fifth year where the students continue working on their journeys in some capacity with the safety net of being a student,” says Lattimore. “It’s experiential. It’s solving a problem. It’s the true meaning of entrepreneurship.”
Seniors Derek Gilmore and Bailey Rossenfeld handle the sales and operations, respectively, for Bench Top’s latest creation, Noosh. Gilmore, a business major, started looking into the program in junior year.
“I just wanted an opportunity to put what I've learned in the classroom to an actual test and see if I'm good at it,” says Gilmore.
Rossenfeld, a mathematical economics major, said she had a background in the food industry but didn’t know anything about the business side of things. As operations officer, some of her experiential learning includes a lesson in adversity.
“We had some issues with shipping early on. We had damaged orders, which was difficult for me to process,” says Rossenfeld. “Suddenly, everything you're doing is having real repercussions.”
Mier says those repercussions include grades. There are assigned readings, guest speakers, and papers, but student grades come from peer reviews.
“If you don't do a good job, you don't get good reviews, you're not going to get an ‘A,’” says Mier. “But we do it mid-semester so that you get the feedback, correct, and improve — just like real life.”
Mier says he hopes Bench Top will continue to evolve for years to come and that more schools and departments will join in. “My hope is that other professors will extend this experiential component into their curriculum,” he adds.